When you consider how helpful this is for recruitment and winning the hearts and minds of the programming elite this program is actually cheap. I would recommend governments and supranational organisations to do the same.

They have the money now to open their own online school. They can select the best coders and pay them to create valuable code under the GPL, they can also allow coders to contribute code in exchange for further education.

It's really amazing how a drop in the bucket (for Google) can encourage so much innovation and foster so much enthusiasm in the next generation of programmers.

The stipend averages out to $5376 per student, which will surely go a long way to paying for rent between semesters and then some.

I'm fully aware that programming has lower fixed costs than say, recombinant organism research or semiconductor development, but I can't help but wonder how many STEM students we could encourage by redirecting just 1% of the U.S. national defense budget. The gains of such projects really isn't in the end result (though they're nice), but rather in the skills, connections, and confidence that the work inspires.

While it may get your name on the big stage, isn't a ton of money. Normal internships I worked for my engineering degree started mid May, ended mid August. So lets say May 16 - August 19, which is 95 days [timeanddate.com]. You'll probably only work 5/7ths of those days or ~67 days, 8 hours a day for 536 hours.

Or around $10 an hour. Now, most certainly if you're good you can deliver it in much less time. But at the same time. $10/hour is what I made after my freshmen year in 2002. I think I was making around $19-20/hr by 200

Depending on location, indeed. If I had an opportunity to make $6-7k/month over the summer, I'd be telling my day job to stuff it, sign a loan on a new BMW M3, and I'd stick with that "6-7k/month" internship forever.

Common sense ideas like yours won't be possible until moderate Republicans take back the party.

Sarcasm, or no? It was Republicans who advocated, passed, and then underfunded No Child Left Behind. The Democratic party is seeing fit to run with it though.

As I see it, every few years there are renewed pushes to get kids interested in the sciences to little apparent effect. US culture idolizes sports and entertainment while mocking geeks and scientists. Those who are qualified to work in science and reject the big incomes of finance cannot find corresponding work because foreigners are sought after to

Republicrats and Demicans are not the solution to any problem. But neither are the people at the extremes. And for every (R) you don't like, I'm sure there is a (D) on the other side that is just as horrible that you ignore, because... well you might like what they do MOST of the time (or visa versa if you're an (R).

And the (R) are out of whack because the (D) showed themselves out of Whack previously, passing the boondongle of HealthCare reform that does nothing to reform HealthCare other than to create y

1. More open source software means more ability for young innovators to create cool new stuff on the Internet.

2. More cool new stuff on the Internet means people spend more time online.

3. The more time people spend online, the more likely they are to see an ad or click on it.

4. Profit!

Also, a side benefit is that M$ profit gets reduced because they have to fight side battles with a 101 open-source projects. This is asymmetrical warfare in that a small investment in open source can me

1. More open source software means more ability for young innovators to create cool new stuff on the Internet.

2. More cool new stuff on the Internet means people spend more time online.

3. The more time people spend online, the more likely they are to see an ad or click on it.

4. Profit!

Also, a side benefit is that M$ profit gets reduced because they have to fight side battles with a 101 open-source projects. This is asymmetrical warfare in that a small investment in open source can mean a huge loss to Microsoft.

For most people, it is the content on the internet that is the cool stuff, whether it's accessed via open or closed source software is irrelevant.

No, what I'm talking about is that almost all of the cool web 2.0 (or 1.0) stuff is built with open source software.

If you're a bunch of college guys trying to come up with the Next Big Thing, it's very easy for you to cobble it together using LAMP for the platform, Postfix+Dovecot for email. To the extent that GIMP and Inkscape work well, you've got your graphics that you need to create for your website right there.

To the extent that such open source software is available, and it works well (the point of S

When I was in college a few years back, almost every prof was working on research products for the military. This means that the military is effectively paying stipends to a small army of grad students. When you add in things like the research that Lockheed and the such are doing (and funding), the military is in fact doing exactly what you are suggesting what it does. Most of the cost of all of those high end weapons is R&D, and when you get down to it, R&D dollars is paying some grad student somew

Both Fedora and Ubuntu will reap benefits, because they will end up packaging many of the results.
But even more importantly, people around the world will reap the benefits. Not only immediately (from these projects), but even more importantly, but also from all the amazing work these developers will do in the years ahead because they they learned how to collaboratively develop software.
Good job.

Supporting the Summer of Code is my favorite aspect of the Google Corporation. They help young guys learn real programming and also improve lots of open source projects. It would be great if other big companies also did this, but after so many years, I doubt it will happen.

I don't mean to sound harsh, but has SETI produced any results that might justify further funding it? I understand the "it's cool!" factor, and I understand that we don't really expect to find alien civilizations every day, and I understand how important of a discovery it would be if we did discover intelligent extraterrestrial life... however, I also think that, given $5 million, we'll see far greater returns on investing that money in Summer of Code than we would supporting SETI. The expected results from

Two of the GSOC projects this year were for the SETI Institute [seti.org]. Apparently, the SETI Institute proposed 5 projects, but only 2 of them were funded.

I would guess that at least one off them was a project "to develop an algorithm capable of producing a fictitious but convincing pattern out of vast amounts of random data in order to justify further funding for the SETI project".

It's in their right, but then why bother with GSoC at all, if you're not going to use the results of it? When people come and see tasks posted by various projects, they kinda assume that those tasks are actually meaningful, and not just a waste of time.

Google doesn't pick the projects. Google picks the organisations, and they pick the projects. Over the last few years, there has been an increasing trend towards picking large umbrella groups (e.g. KDE, GNU), so Google is two layers of management away from the actual decision.

This has nothing to do with "good" or "evil".It has to do with the basic fact that businesses exist in order to make money.If it's not supposed to make money, it's called a "non-profit".There simply isn't any bigger picture than that besides the one you've made up in your own head.

...to get onboard, but have been rejected each time. The amount of detail that Google requires for its application is just mind-boggling. More mind-boggling is the selection process that seems to favor established projects with large developer bases that really aren't in need of extra help. Good luck getting on the SoC bandwagon if you're a small (but established) open software project.

Many small but established open source projects enrolled in SoC this year just fine. They didn't get many slots, but they got their feet in the door. When I filled out my org's application, it took like 30 minutes. It wasn't hard at all..

Proof by contradiction. Mixxx (http://mixxx.org) has probably 2-5 active developers and we've received 3 or 4 students every year since the beginning of the SOC. I've been to the GSoC mentor summit as well and there are plenty of small sized projects. In fact, this year they focused on accepting more smaller projects via the 'referral' system whereby projects could refer other small projects that would be a good fit for the SOC.

Considering that Sourceforge.net alone hosts "over 260 000 projects" one cannot be faulted for deducing that perhaps they do receive a large number of applications. I would wager they try select projects which will most "benefit mankind". All subjective off course but show me a process that is perfect. Good luck next year.

I was surprised to read that Fedora didn't have any students this year (after all, my proposal for Fedora was accepted but I chose Tor in the de-duplication process). As it turns out, Fedora actually has six projects this year. The full list of accepted projects is available here [google-melange.com].